African charities and NGOs: the Africa charity database

How are NGOs and charities regulated in Africa?

NGOs and charities in Africa operate under a patchwork of national systems rather than one continental framework: some countries run dedicated nonprofit regulators with public registers, others register nonprofits through general company or association law with little open data. That difference, not the actual size of each country's civil society, is what drives the record counts you see on this page.

Which African countries have a public charity or NGO register?

Where dedicated regulators exist, the legal forms are recognizable. South Africa registers nonprofit organisations (NPOs) under the Nonprofit Organisations Act, administered by the Department of Social Development's NPO Directorate. Nigeria registers charities as incorporated trustees with the Corporate Affairs Commission, the same body that registers companies. Tanzania's Registrar of NGOs runs the NGOs Information System. Ethiopia's Authority for Civil Society Organizations issues registration numbers and maintains a current register. Ghana's Non-Profit Organisation Secretariat and Malawi's NGO Regulatory Authority (NGORA) are younger bodies with published datasets. Uganda splits the work between the Registration Services Bureau and an NGO Bureau. Common forms across these systems include the NPO, the registered NGO, the trust, the association, and the company limited by guarantee.

What happens when a country has no open register?

Elsewhere the picture is thinner. Kenya's NGO Coordination Board publishes a list of names without registration numbers, so Kenyan records on GiveRadar are treated as directory-listed rather than registry-verified. Across much of North Africa and several smaller states there is no open register at all, and Africa charity organizations there enter GiveRadar through vetted directories such as arab.org, national NGO councils, and civic-sector datasets; a few other countries carry smaller record sets from other public sources. For the directory-sourced countries our profiles say "listed on GiveRadar", never "registered", because we will not claim registry sourcing we do not have.

What does an African charity record on GiveRadar contain?

What a record contains also follows its source. Registry-sourced records carry official names and registration identifiers; contact details, websites, and narratives are added through enrichment where public sources exist, up to 80+ normalized fields per record where the source publishes them. Financial figures are limited across most of the continent because few African registers publish them, and we display financials only where a source does. If you need a list of NGOs in Africa for research or grantmaking, the honest version is exactly this: strong registry data in seven countries, curated directory data in the rest, and per-country "last updated" dates so you can see how fresh each set is.